Water is everywhere, and we need it for everything. Here are some fun and interesting facts about the most important substance on the planet.
Where there's water, there's life – on Earth, anyway.
Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with water and drew it over and over again, as well as spent a lot of time working out how it flowed. He even came up with a plan to use water to win a war – working with Niccolo Machiavelli to try and divert the River Arno (they didn't actually do it).
Saturn's moon Enceladus has a warm ocean trapped under its icy crust, which earth's astrobiology experts think makes it an excellent place to look for signs of alien life. This is because a hydrothermal vent at the bottom of one of our oceans is believed to be the start of life on earth.
The Mpemba effect refers to the fact that for some reason still unknown to us, hot water freezes faster than cold water. Cool, huh?
All earth's water landed here in comets and asteroids, between 4.5 billion and 3.8 billion years ago. This period was called the Late Heavy Bombardment.
Water molecules are super-sticky, which means it can pull blood up, and even narrow blood vessels in the body. It literally keeps us alive.
The stickiness of water is also what makes it liquid at room temperature – comparable compounds such as ammonia are gases at room temperature.
Human bones are 31% water.
As a fetus, your body is around 95% water. This decreases to 77% at birth, and between 60 and 70% as an adult.
Unlike most other liquids, water expands when it freezes. This has helped the planet sustain life even during multiple Ice Ages, as lakes and rivers freeze from the top down, so there has always been liquid water to support life.
More than half of the water we use at home is used in the bathroom. It takes eight liters to flush a toilet, which is about the same as we use to brush our teeth.
Water dissolves more chemicals than any other liquid.
97% of. earth's water is salty 70% of earth's water is frozen. 2.1% takes the form of polar ice caps. Less than 1% is fresh water.
Water is the second most commonly-occurring molecule in the universe (as far as we know it). Hydrogen is the most common.
If all the water in the world could fit into a single gallon jug, fresh water would be about one tablespoon of it.
The Antarctic is covered in more than 10 thousand trillion tons of ice.
Twelve billion light years away from earth, NASA scientists discovered the universe's biggest cloud of water vapor. It contains 14 trillion times as much water as there is in all of our oceans.
The sun creates 100 million times the amount of water in the whole Amazon River in a single second. Every second.
There are more than 800,000 miles of water pipes providing water to homes in the United States.
